Why Your AI Safety Theater Is Killing Innovation: A Product Manager's Guide to Chaos Capital
My six-year-old daughter doesn't understand rules yet. She approaches problems with a raw curiosity that cuts through layers of inherited assumptions. Watching her reminded me of something uncomfortable: we're managing AI products with the same risk-averse playbook we used for shipping physical products in the 1990s, when failure meant recalling inventory and issuing apologies on primetime television.
But here's what changed: the cost of failure has collapsed to near-zero while we're still acting like we're launching space shuttles.
The Evolution Problem
I've been thinking about first principles after listening to recent conversations with AI product leaders who are actually shipping. Evolution didn't optimize for safety. It optimized for rapid iteration with massive failure tolerance. The organisms that survived weren't the ones with the best guardrails, they were the ones that could adapt fastest to changing conditions.
